


Sensory Series

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-13 01:26:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11749236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: An exploration of Mulder and Scully's developing relationship through the senses.





	1. See Me

She unfolds the bill and knows it’s going to be scary. Her parents brought her up to save money, to be frugal, to put some aside each month ‘just in case’, to leave luxury to those who had nothing better to aim for. She has never been one for unnecessary expense, for outright extravagance but she hadn’t been able to resist. And that little plastic card had lured her with its shiny accessibility, a Siren call.  
But it was all Mulder’s fault. He was the one who had made the remark. Casual for him, thrown out not even as bait, but because he always has to say something, can’t just sit in silence at these things and observe. For her, the remark was cutting, stayed with her for a year.  
“I can’t imagine you ever wearing anything like that, Scully.” He turned away from her, which was a good thing, because she’d never been able to hide her blushes. And she turned red, uncomfortably red from her breast bone to her forehead. Why? He’d thrown lines like that at her for years. She never usually gave them a second thought. She put it down to his inability to fit in with any social expectations. He had no filter. He thought, he spoke.  
She also believed that sometimes he looked at her, looked through her, like she was some kind of homogenous being, simply a work partner. Her gender didn’t matter. He liked her, she knew that. Maybe even felt something more. Certainly, her abduction and return, and cases like Modell and Pfaster, events like Emily, the cancer…she knew he felt something deeper, but Mulder didn’t ever seem to view her as the deep-thinking, sensuous woman that she could be.  
Should she really care? It was a line to cross, a fucking huge line. Admitting feelings for anyone was a red flag, but for a partner, for someone like Mulder, so flighty and insecure, it could spell disaster.  
“I can’t imagine you ever wearing anything like that, Scully.”  
Well, why the fuck not, Mulder? Why should Agent Disisto get to wear something like that and get your attention? Why can’t you look at me beyond my suits and my chunky heels and my scrubs? I’m here. I’m right here. Why can’t you see me?  
She takes a swig of wine. The shiraz burns on her tongue and emboldens her. She looks at the numbers on her statement. Then she looks at the dress hanging against the closet door.  
Pale turquoise satin, spaghetti straps, draped bodice, nipped to the waist, fishtailed to the floor. There are silver sandals, a silver clutch, a pair of pearl drop earrings and a matching necklace.  
At this year’s Ball, she is going to cross that fucking huge line.  
And when she does, Mulder might just see her.


	2. Hear You

He once investigated a case of a young boy who was possessed. The child had been kept in his bedroom for weeks because he’d vandalised his neighbours’ garden multiple times. The family priest had been brought in to exorcise the boy’s demons. The neighbours complained that the child was creepy. The boy’s parents told Mulder he’d always heard voices. When Mulder talked to the boy, he said the flowers were in pain. When Mulder talked to the neighbours, they showed him their gardens. Masses of showy blooms in bright colours, strangely bright. During the course of his investigation, Mulder found that the neighbours had chemically altered the natural colours of the flowers. The boy was right. The flowers were in pain. They told him. And he heard them.  
When Scully arrives, she is wearing a long silvery-grey coat. One he hasn’t seen before. It is cool outside, but the hall where the ball is being held is warm with lights, with voices, with the easiness that social occasions bring out in most people.  
He knows he isn’t most people, he always stands on the outside. He doesn’t fit in, and he likes that. He also knows Scully isn’t most people. She started out as a ready spy, but became more than just a partner. Over the years, she has become his most trusted ally, his best friend. And just lately, she has become a woman for whom he would do anything.  
The band is playing and the strings are like angel voices floating around the hall. The clink of glasses, the rise and fall of laughter and tall tales, footsteps waltzing across the dance floor, the sounds of moves being made, of bureau protocol being ignored.  
At the table, Mulder smiles at Scully and she smiles back. The gentle pop as her lips part stays with him. The skirts of her dress rustle as she leans forward to take a sip of her drink. He can hear the fizz of the champagne bubbles sparkling on her tongue. She sits her chin on her hand and the bracelet she is wearing chinks as it slips down her wrist. She plays with her earring. They’re new, he thinks. To match the necklace that hangs tantalisingly above her breasts. The straps of her dress separate the splash of freckles across her shoulders. A map. A map he wants to explore. He wonders what she would taste like, how the sound of his lips against her skin would be?  
“Mulder?” Her voice is lighter tonight. He wonders what hope sounds like.  
“Yes, Scully.”  
“I haven’t told you how handsome you look tonight. I…you…that suit looks…nice.”  
He swears he hears the rushing of the blood to her cheeks. “Thank you. And you…”  
Skinner sits down with a huge grin and a beer flush on his face. He slaps Mulder across the shoulders and leans in. “You are the best looking agent in this room, Muller.” Scully’s giggle tinkles and cuts through Mulder’s embarrassment. “Have you asked the most beautiful agent in the room to dance yet, Muller, because if you haven’t, I will.”  
Her gasp is audible, despite her attempts to smother it into her hand. Mulder can see no escape and he holds out his hand to her. She chuffs out a laugh as Skinner pouts.  
“If you didn’t want to dance with me, you didn’t have to, Mulder. I can totally see Skinner as a waltzing man.”  
He lowered his head to her neck and whispered, “He’s got enough alcohol in him to become a Dirty Dancing man, Scully. And I wouldn’t wish that on you. Not in that dress.” She giggles again and looks up at him. The band is playing Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful and he holds his breath before speaking again, “which, by the way, is stunning. I never imagined you wearing anything like this, Scully.”  
He feels her hesitate, stiffen.  
“Because I’m just your partner?” Her tone is tight. “Suits and sensible shoes, overcoats and a holster. That’s how you see me, isn’t it?”  
He turns her in time to the music, trying to make up for his mistake. They move slow enough so he can hear the light step of her thin stiletto heel on the wooden floor, the swish of her skirts against his pants. He can hear her breathing, quick, shallow spurts.  
He looks down at her, the sheen of her turquoise dress, catching the light, the drapey neckline that clings to the swell of her breasts, accentuates her waist, skims her hips and falls the floor in a mermaid’s tail. Her necklace sits against her skin, a delicate silver chain holding a pearl. Such a precious thing. Her hair is clasped in a loose coil at the back of her head and curls fall around her face. Her eyes are so clear, filled with promise.  
“I see you, Scully. I really do. But hearing you is better.”  
She frowns, purses those sumptuous lips. “I don’t understand.”  
“I investigated a case once where a young child had a form of synesthesia. His parents didn’t understand that his sensory system worked differently, and that when he looked at flowers or other brightly coloured things, he heard them too. That case stayed with me.”  
“I still don’t understand.”  
“When I look at you, I hear things. Beautiful sounds, a harp strummed, waves on the shore, bird song, a newborn snuffling in his sleep, the sigh of a paintbrush over a blank canvas.”  
She blushes and looks away from him. He takes their clasped hands and turns her face back to him. “I do see you, Scully,” He drops their hands to his heart. “But when I hear you, it hits me right here.”


	3. Healing Touch

Diana Fowley is dead. She has to tell him and she is dreading it. She has rehearsed the words over and over but when he opens the door she is bereft of words. His face is softer somehow, gentle. She removes his cap and listens to his words about Albert Hosteen. She doesn’t believe him. She can’t believe him. He was there. She prayed with him. And yet she knows Mulder is not lying to her. He opens himself up to her with beautiful sentiments about how she is his constant, his touchstone. She runs her thumbs over his lips and she is undone. It is difficult to turn away, but he has been through so much.  
She walks down his hallway and considers how many significant moments have passed between them here. His shitty apartment block has become a cornerstone of their nearly moments. She would laugh at the irony of their almost kiss if it weren’t so painful for her to remember her icy prison; she would indulge in the fantasy of nearly kissing Mulder, if it weren’t so humiliating that she told her college story to a would-be rapist; she would wonder at the length of time she sat with him on his couch going through case files or arguing against the existence of life on other planets or convincing him that completing paperwork on time saved hours of interrogation by auditors later, if it hadn’t been such a ride.  
She is waiting for the lift when he lays a hand on her shoulder, strong and warm. She feels a ripple through her insides, powerful to the point of pain. She runs her hands down her thighs and turns to face him. He is still wearing that damned stupid cap but there is something so vulnerable about him that strikes at her core.  
“Will you stay, Scully?” he says.  
“Mulder, are you okay?”  
He has undergone back-street brain surgery. He has lost a friend. They have both been witness to the remarkable and unexplainable, to the horrors that power can deal out. There are so many questions. And yet his one question seems burdened with the weight of the universe and its mysteries. A simple four words. Will you stay, Scully?

His apartment is a comforting mess. So Mulder. On his walls are prints and movie posters, blistered paintwork, shadows of his past. In his kitchen are the bare essentials but he makes the tea with surprising care and precision. In his living room, the green glow of his fish tank wraps itself around her, settling on her shoulders like an old lover. She sinks into the leather cushion of her side of the couch and he sits next to her. He sits forward though, elbows on knees.  
“You should be in bed, Mulder. I can stay here, if you like. I’ll grab some linen.”  
He swings round, his mouth open in surprise. “No, Scully. I don’t want that.”  
“So, what then?” She reaches out to him, flattens a palm over his back, and the plane of his muscles ripple under her hand.  
She thinks that perhaps he doesn’t know what he wants. He’s in a kind of perpetual shock, his life has been one protracted incident, so many losses, so many bitter disappointments. And he has been so alive that it brought him close to his death. She doesn’t know how to make it better.  
He shrugs.  
“Oh, Mulder,” she says, sliding forward on the couch so that their legs are pressed together. “Tell me what you want.”  
He turns to her and there are tears in his eyes. “My brain is so busy, it won’t let me be. I just want to be.”  
“We can just be, Mulder. If that’s what you want.”  
He falls into her, a surprisingly light weight at her side. She lets herself think that it’s because they fit so well, that together they are one. But she admonishes the skittishness of the thought and lets him sink further into her until his head is on her lap.  
“’S’like Mothman, Scully,” he says.  
She chuckles and strokes his hair. It is always thicker and coarser than she remembers. “Don’t ask me to sing.”  
His shoulders move up and down the slight friction against her thighs unsettles her. She shifts under him and he glances up at her. “I had dreams, Scully. Fantasies, almost. I…I can’t explain it, but I know they were wrong. Like they were introduced to make me think it was my life.”  
“What do you mean?”  
“I married Diana. We had kids. It was…so illusory, so fake. But I was helpless to fight it, I was trapped in this make believe world and I had to go along with it. But it was all a lie.”  
His voice is tight, gravelled with fatigue. She shushes him, placing a finger over his mouth as she massages his scalp.  
“But you, Scully,” he says looking up at her and clasping her hand in his. “You were real. You were bright and strong and lifelike. You were no illusion. Only you were real.”  
“It’s okay, Mulder. The anaesthetic they gave you, the treatment, it was… barbaric. It’s understandable that your memories are mixed up.”  
He laughs. “You can never be anyone but you, Scully.” He kisses her knuckles and she feels the warm press of his lips tingle through her veins.  
“Is that a good thing?” She lets the question hang.  
His lips whisper over the skin on the underside of her wrist and she squeezes her eyes shut as he moves her hand down so that he is kissing to her elbow. “You can never be anything other than a good thing, Scully.”  
He turns so that his face is against her abdomen and she can barely breathe. His head in her lap, his nose pressing against the fabric of her blouse, his hand in hers, the other under his face, his legs curled up, making him seem so vulnerable. She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and watches the patterns of her thoughts swirling there.  
“Scully?”  
“Yes?”  
“What happened to you? In Africa?”  
She lets out a breath and feels his face press closer to her stomach. “I saw things. Strange things. Like your dreams, I can’t really explain it. But I feel different somehow. Like something has changed inside me. I can’t articulate it.” She looks down at him and strokes his fringe away from the bandage. “I don’t know what happened in Africa, Mulder. I just don’t know.”  
“I feel it too, Scully. I feel a change in you and a change in me. Like we’ve been touched, somehow.”  
“You nearly died, Mulder.”  
“But we’ve seen it before.”  
“What?”  
“Healing. Samuel Hartley in Tennessee, Jeremiah Smith. There are many cultures around the world that believe in the power of touch.”  
“Mulder,” she says, trying not to sigh too deeply. “You should sleep.”  
“I can’t. I know something has shifted for us. I want to hold on to that feeling for a while.”  
She knows it too. She feels it deep inside. Something has stirred within both of them. She lets the tears fill her eyes. He reaches up a hand and strokes her cheek with the lightest of touches. He brushes away her tears and pulls her face towards him.


	4. A Taste of Other

He has seen his life in another’s arms. Diana Fowley was posed as his wife, the mother of his children. He didn’t like it. It stung and galled and burned. Now, in his sleep, he pushes away the lingering memories, or are they dreams? His body has almost recovered but he worries that his mind may never be entirely his own again. He is thankful that Scully is attentive in the field these days, flirty almost. He likes this side of her. A little reminder of the young woman she was way back when, the girl in the ill-fitting suit, with the wide-eyed innocence masking the cutting intellect. The girl who smiled.  
But what of Scully’s life in another’s arms? He is trying to imagine this Daniel, the professor who should have known better, but fell headlong into the temptation of a young Dana. What was it about this man? She is trying to explain, but he can’t get past the idea of her in a Buddhist temple having a life-changing moment without him. He wants to delve further into the visions and the collective unconscious and auras. But she needs to talk about Daniel. About what has been and about what might have been.  
He is expounding about fate and destiny when he turns to see she is asleep. In this state, she is returned to that young girl, that innocent, and his heart aches. There has been a pull, a gravity to their relationship recently. Something shifted earlier in the year. He kissed her on New Year’s Eve. And since, he has tested and weighed and measured their partnership. Using her science practices to test something intangible. He pulls the blanket over her and ponders the way life has led them to this point.  
What if she had declined Blevins request to debunk his work? Would she be Chief Medical Examiner somewhere more exotic than DC? What if she hadn’t been returned? Would he have finally succumbed to the ever-present darkness that often threatened to overwhelm him? What if Emily had lived? Would she have stepped back from her work to be the kind of mother he knew she could be? And what if he’d pushed her too hard to believe in his quests, his notions, his ideals? Would she have thrown her hands up and walked away?  
How many times has fate stepped in to save them? How many times has destiny turned on itself and shown them a different path? How many ways can he be thankful that despite all they’ve endured, they are here together in his apartment? He pushes her hair out of her face. Under his touch she is cool so he tucks the blanket under her chin. His bed sheets are cold and he curls on his side, hugging his knees and wonders how she would feel against him.  
In his dream she is naked. She is a beauty, all pale skin and rose tips and gentle valleys. She is pliant and serious and otherworldly. She is silence and an echoing avalanche. But when he looks he is not him. He is Daniel and she is young and scratching his back with her naiveté. She slips away from him, folding in on herself like a transition between frames.  
When he looks again she is with Jack, fire blazing and snow falling. She is stronger here, wears her vulnerability close to her skin and shucks it off when she needs to. He can almost reach her, in this dream, he stretches his fingers out, greedy for her touch.  
The third time she is fiery and mutinous. She is breathing fast and hard and she throws off her mantle of prudence. She shakes her flaming hair down her back and he spreads his hand out desperate to follow the path of her spine down to the snake that is there to remind him of the infinite cycle of reinvention. But he is Ed Jerse, eyes wild and mind wilder.  
He wakes with a start. He shivers and goes to pull the duvet further up his body but it is stuck. He turns to sit and she is there, at the side of his bed, holding the covers. She is undressed save for her underwear. In the shadows of his room and in the shadows of his mind she is even more beautiful than he has ever imagined.  
“Are you sure, Scully?”  
“I think this is the right path for us, Mulder.”  
She slips under the sheets and presses herself into him. His arms engulf her and he pulls her even closer. He bends to kiss her and she tastes like coffee and sleep and promises. He savours the salt and the sweet, he bites and sips and nibbles and samples. She is gourmet and home-style and his appetite for her is voracious. He has never tasted better and he knows there will be no other.  
She is gone before he wakes but when he opens his eyes he sees clearly for the first time in years.


	5. The Scent of an Ending

You know how she likes her coffee, you know the setting to get the right shade of toast on her crumpets, you know which brand of peanut butter is her favourite. You’ve learned more about skin care products and hair depilation than you ever knew you needed to know. In a few more hours you’ll have down pat the precise order of delicate noises she makes at the point she’s about to come. But for now you’re happy to just let each time you’ve heard them play over in your mind.  
You love the feel of her hair on your face, of her cold feet on your calves, of her fingers around her cock. In years from now, you’ll miss these things.  
You love the taste of her mouth, the spot under her ear, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin under her breasts, the dent of her belly button, the slick of her centre. You have seen her lost in rapture, you have heard her moan, you have touched her as she burns, you have tasted her sweet tang and you have woken up surrounded by the smell of the one you love.  
You watch the way the muscles ripple down his back when he stretches. You love the curl at the nape of his neck and the surprisingly soft sprinkle of hairs on his chest. You relish the lazy minutes first thing on grey mornings when you lie in his arms and listen to his heartbeat. You like matching his socks and laughing at his outrageous tie collection and looking at his photo albums when Samantha was more than just a shadow on his soul.  
You love to lick the crumbs from his lips, steal the last chip from the bowl, rest your feet on his thighs, straddle his ass and massage his shoulders and in a few hours you’ll learn exactly how hard to grasp him to render him speechless. But for now you’re happy with the way he swallows your name with each stroke.  
You love the glow of his fish tank that unfurls over the walls as you ride him, listening to the creak of the couch under you, you love the rough pads of his fingers pushing into your hip bones, the nip of his teeth at your breast. In years to come, you’ll miss these things. You’ll miss his look of childlike wonder, his ability to make you see the magic in the mundane.  
You have seen him cry, you have heard him call out your name, you have touched him as he soared, you have tasted his smoky essence and you have woken enveloped by the smell of the one you love.   
You look at her now as she smiles and you realise there is no going back.   
You look at him and understand what forever means.  
“We could start sharing rooms,” you say to the auditor. You look at her and she covers a smile with her hand. You haven’t told her today how much you love it when she laughs at your terrible jokes.  
“So much of the work we do cannot be measured in standard terms,” you say and he looks at you with pride. You haven’t told him today how much you’ve loved the work.  
“I think I’m in big trouble,” you say and she waits for you to elaborate. This is the best part. Her eyebrow, her folded arms.  
“Did you hurt him?” you ask, and you hope he did.  
“More alien abductions, Scully,” you say and you know she is already mentally packing her bags.  
“I don’t know how we could justify the expense,” you say and you can hear him saying plausible in that tone.  
“We’d probably turn up nothing.” And in a few days you’ll wish it were true.  
“Let’s go waste some money.” And in a few days you’ll spend hours turning those words over and over in your mind.  
But for now, you’re happy to kiss the top of her head and breathe in the smell of her shampoo.  
But for now you’re satisfied with the feel of his arms around you and the smell of his cologne filling your lungs.


End file.
